Skepticism

EVENTS

Erasing women from media

Someone has made a de-feminized version of Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Why? I don’t know. There are people who enjoy making fan-edits of popular movies, but this one…its sole explicit purpose is to remove women from it, to remove and minimize central characters simply because they’re women. I guess the motivation has to have been that he resents the autonomy of half the population of the planet, and also has a lot of bigoted opinions about women.

It’s very strange. There are people out there who just hate other people for their sex and sexuality. It’s a sad sick world with people like that in it.

It would probably be easier to make a list of things that were kept instead of things that were changed. Hardly any scene got away without cuts.

The resulting movie is (wait for it …) 46 minutes long.

Yeah I know, it’s not ideal. It’s made from a CAM source (the most recent HDTC one with the Asian hard subs, which is pretty watchable). It has issues. But it had to be done.

You will probably enjoy it most when you view it less as a blockbuster movie and more as some kind of episode from some non-existent mediocre Star Wars series.

Here’s a short rundown of changes (spoilers! full list in description.txt):
– No whiny/reluctant/murderous psycho Luke.
– NO HALDO! She simply doesn’t exist. Her whole subplot doesn’t exist. The Kamikaze is carried out by Poe. ( = Poe dies.)
– Leia never scolds, questions nor demotes Poe.
– Lea dies. Kylo kills her.
– Kylo is more badass and much less conflicted and volatile.
– Kylo takes on more of Snoke’s guards, Rey struggles with a single one.
– No bomber heroism by china girl in the beginning.
– No Canto Bight.
– No superpowered Rey.
– Luke is not a semi-force-ghost and is smashed by the first laser cannon shot. (sorry, I just had to!)
– Phasma is finished after the first blow by Finn. (Women are naturally weaker than men, she isn’t force-sensitive, and we know nothing about any exo-skeleton in her suit)
– Asian chick speaks less, doesn’t bully Finn, Finn doesn’t try to escape, she is never formally introduced. She is just there and occasionally smiles at Finn or screams “Finn!”. She has no sister. Serves her right for all the heinous stuff she did.
– Lots of little cuts reducing the number of female facial shots. Too many to count. (Pun intended.)
– Quite a few scenes rearranged so that the flow of the shortened movie is still somewhat coherent.

Obviously it’s far from perfect. The source is not even on DVD-level. Some of the technical edits were slacked because why not, it’s a CAM source (e.g. some masks and Snoke disappearing). Sometimes there’s an extreme zoom despite the mediocre quality. There are plotholes and continuity errors and some cuts are not as smooth as they should be, especially audio transition-wise. But for what it’s worth, it can now at least be viewed without feeling nauseaus about most of the terrible big and small decisions they made in this film. Also, at least the intro sequence is now very watchable and actually much cooler without all of Leia’s nitpicking. Now it’s all one united Resistance fighting without inner conflict and that’s much more satisfying to watch. Due to the extreme shortening, the whole movie is much more fast-paced now, at times unfortuantely also rushed due to a lack of usable filler footage

There’s also the implicit racism (“china girl”, “Asian chick”). I guess he actually hates a lot more than just half the planet.

Comments

Let’s grant this guy his fondest desire: Ladies, please hold a meeting and edit out any sort of interaction with females from this guy’s life. If he speaks to you, don’t hear him. If he looks at you, walk away.

Better yet, build a wall around this ass clam and never walk inside. Don’t even let the guy have any porn with women it it.

A fine idea, but I think we can extend it. Taken to its logical conclusion, Hurt Snowflake’s own mother would never have had anything to do with him either, and he would just vanish, like God, in a puff of logic. Everybody’s happy.

“Well there are plotholes and continuity errors and really the film doesn’t make any sense at all now but oh well, what can you do? Utter nonsense that’s impossible to follow is better than having to see any kind of acknowledgment that women are people and can do things.”

Somehow, this manages to be completely representative of their worldview. They’ll believe any stupid nonsense that comes their way as long as it tells them they’re superior and the only people who matter. It’s not often I’ve seen them admit it openly, even unintentionally like this.

Wow. Just, wow. How can one human body contain so much blind misogyny?

***SPOILER WARNING FOR THE LAST JEDI***

The part that amuses me the most is that, in his rush to ‘de-feminise’ the movie, he also destroys the character arcs of pretty much all the male characters of note. He wants Luke to be less ‘whiny’ and reluctant and to not have the subplot about experiencing a moment of fear and weakness and threatening his nephew’s life. In other words, he wants the Luke character to stagnate totally for the thirty odd years that are supposed to have passed between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, and to have not changed or experienced any character growth at all in that time. He also missed the subtext in the story that addresses the distinction between the legends that can grow up around prominent people and the reality of that person’s actual, usually complex and messy, humanity. It equally applies to the distinction between what the original Star Wars movies actually were – space fantasy fairy tales with a heavy dose of romanticism and often somewhat grating humour – and the mythic status they have subsequently assumed in the minds of the more rabid fans. He wants to strip the Luke character of nuance and complexity and render him into a self-insert character for older white male Star Wars fans who still desperately want to be the heroic focus of the story even forty years after A New Hope. At the same time, he would remove a critical plank in establishing why the Ben Solo character is the way he is, also weakening his characterisation and casting him more as a simplistically evil villain just because.

He wants rid of the Vice Admiral Holdo character and he doesn’t want Leia to call Poe on his recklessness, thus removing any and all meaningful character arc or development for the Poe character for the entire movie. He just turns up to fly around and shoot at things, and then die with no further development as a character, and that is it.

He want the Ben Solo/Kylo Ren character to be ‘less conflicted and volatile’, meaning that he doesn’t struggle with his many terrible acts and decisions and doesn’t exhibit the inner conflict and turmoil that leads Rey to believe he is still redeemable, thus undermining the sequence where she goes to the Supremacy to try to save him. He also wants this character to murder his mother in cold blood without turning a hair, thus changing that character from one’s whose villainy is complex and comes from a wellspring of his own negative experiences into a two dimensional, totally unrepentant monster with all the narrative sophistication of a brick, which then destroys the logic of the Throne Room scene, since why would he choose Rey over Snoke if he is so monstrously evil?

As for Finn, he wants to almost totally excise Rose from the movie and the Canto Bight sequences, meaning that Finn has little to nothing to do throughout almost the entire movie, doesn’t garner greater insight into how the war is not simplistically black and white because arms traders get fat off both sides in the conflict, and doesn’t learn the thematically vital lesson that you win by fighting to save what you love, not destroy what you hate. Without Rose being there to stop him being an idiot, he would also seemingly kill himself in a kamikaze run on the First Order’s siege cannon, killing off his character as well, also with no further character development.

Oh look – if you cut almost all the female characters out of the movie, you also mutilate the male character’s arcs to them point where they might as well not be there either. It is almost as if the female characters of the saga are essential to the core story structure, and the film makers understood that…

Phasma is finished after the first blow by Finn. (Women are naturally weaker than men, she isn’t force-sensitive, and we know nothing about any exo-skeleton in her suit)

This guy has never seen a sports, military, or police woman fight a man of similar occupation. But he cares about realism or something so he made sure to address the possibility of exo-skeletons! “I don’t see anything on Wookiepedia about Phasma having an exo-skeleton, wtf how did the fight last longer than the first blow? NAUSEATING!”

He wants rid of the Vice Admiral Holdo character and he doesn’t want Leia to call Poe on his recklessness, thus removing any and all meaningful character arc or development for the Poe character for the entire movie.

In fairness, if I had been in command at that point, Poe wouldn’t have had any character development either – at least, not beyond the 45 seconds or so he would have spent trying to develop the ability to breathe vacuum after I had him tossed out of the nearest airlock.

That MovieBob video does make a lot of interesting points, though I think you could even take his analysis a step further – far from being irredeemable, I think the movies have already clearly telegraphed that the Ben Solo/Kylo Ren character is not only redeemable, but has already taken his first steps on the path toward redemption by rejecting Snoke – who would seem to be the worst of all bad fanboys – in favour of Rey, who embodies positive fandom and who was prepared to reach out to Ben Solo and offer him a better alternative even though he was being a total jerk at the time. This fits into MovieBob’s analysis as the notion that not even the bad fanboys have to stay bad fanboys; that there is always a way back to engaging positively with the Star Wars universe if you are prepared to be a better person and let your resentment and sense of unearned entitlement go.

Combat training just doesn’t exist in his sad little universe, does it? He also totally ignores the fact that Phasma is a very physically capable front line combat officer, and you wouldn’t occupy that role if you couldn’t handle yourself in a fight.

So, you have an elite combat officer using her own weapons that we must assume she favours, or at least is highly proficient with, versus… a former sapce janitor with barely any combat experience who has just picked up a weapon that, so far as we know, he has never even held before and has only seen being used once. In such a situation, and with all proper recognition of ‘realism’, my money would not be on the bloke…

Well somebody just revealed his deep-seated insecurity and rank misogyny. Too bad he didn’t have the courage to attach his real name to it, so he could reap the “benefits” of his oh-so-manly perspective.

No Canto Bight.
– Luke is not a semi-force-ghost and is smashed by the first laser cannon shot. (sorry, I just had to!)

What am I missing here?

Also, after thinking about this, I would rank this as the best star wars movie made so far. It is actually an intelligently written movie despite the handicap given by the setting of the Star Wars universe and the previous movies.

@Gregory Greenwood, #16:
“Measured” ain’t the half of it. In a real-world military, the first fifteen minutes would have seen Poe thrown in stockade, pending trial for failure to obey orders and chronic insubordination. The third act of the film would have probably have seen him awaiting trial for cowardice and desertion; in times of war, this is traditionally punishable by death. After first getting his entire squad killed and then bailing on all his fellows, Poe’s former peers might not have minded if the Admiral skipped the judicial formalities and simply had Poe shot.

You could use the “original movie length / edited movie length” metric as a rough measure of the quality of the movie. The further from “1” the number drifts, the more it infuriates the MRAs and, therefore, the better the movie.

specialffrog #14
The shot of Chewy tossing the roasted porg was cut and Cookie Monster eating sound effects added to the close-up shot of the porg with the trembling lip/beak.

Gregory Greenwood #13
I like where you’re going, but I don’t quite agree. I see Kylo killing Snoke to be parallel with killing Han and trying to kill Luke. He’s out to destroy his father figures who out-stage him so he could claim the title of King of the Badasses. He’s a self-insert fanfic writer who only fought alongside Ray so she’d join him and confirm his “manly alpha-male-manliness”.

@dreikin, #27: Whoops, I got mixed up and briefly forgot Poe doesn’t actually accompany Rose and Finn to Space Vegas. (I’ve only seen the movie once, though I’m hoping to see it again before it leaves the theaters.) Poe does stage a mutiny, though, which is traditionally another “shoot you and throw you off the ship, not necessarily in that order” offense.

If someone like this needs an action film without icky girls to ruin things I’d recommend the 1977 Hong Kong film The Shaolin Plot. As far as I can tell there are literally no female characters in it. They didn’t even bother with a romantic subplot for the hero, played by James Tien. So no complicated editing is needed to “de-feminize” it.

(On a more serious note I actually would recommend this one to ’70s marital arts movie fans. Besides playing an evil lama with deadly cymbals Sammo Hung was the action director, and came up with some pretty cool stuff.)

*I like TLJ. And the more I think about it my biggest concern with it is it repeatedly backs down on being subversive. I would have pushed the text to further alienate fans of OT*

I hate fans edits as a concept so much. This one is particularly bad because of the underlying misogyny but like the fan supercut of PT is also morally awful. Likewise, the purist cut of LOTR is terrible.

If you don’t like movie don’t watch it. Don’t steal others people’s work to “improve” it.

I think the Secret sauce is revealed here: “Now it’s all one united Resistance fighting without inner conflict and that’s much more satisfying to watch.” -That is fascism folx, right there. Dissent is icky and unsatisfying and we should silence it? That is at the heart of what Nazis are all about.

Scene 1: Bunch of truckers in a diner making awkward small-talk
Scene 2: Guy comes home from work to empty house, sits in front of TV with frozen dinner and can of beer
Scene 3: Brad Pitt walking down street, wondering why he can’t get a ride
Scene 4: Bunch of state troopers standing around rim of Grand Canyon, shuffling nervously with vague feeling that something is about to happen, or perhaps has just happened